Providers of broadcasts of live events, such as sporting events, insert commercial messages at breaks in the events in order to generate revenue from their broadcasts. Typically, this is accomplished manually. A producer of a live event (e.g., in a remote production facility at the site of a sporting event) communicates directly with a system operator (e.g., a broadcaster's headquarters); the producer informs the operator that a break is forthcoming, and at the appropriate time (e.g., at the end of a countdown provided by the producer), the system operator manually triggers the insertion of a commercial. This approach does not scale well where the same provider broadcasts a large number of events, due to the need for personnel to staff each event. Therefore, providers may wish to be able to detect the onset of a break automatically, without human intervention, in order to be able to broadcast larger numbers of events without the need for equally larger numbers of personnel.
Some digital video recorder (“DVR”) devices include logic operative to detect the onset of a commercial break. The goal of a DVR device in including this ability is to enable a user of the device to automatically skip commercials once they have been detected. A DVR having this ability may monitor a video broadcast to detect when a commercial has been inserted by a broadcaster (e.g., by detecting a number of consecutive black frames or an absence of a network logo, also known as a “bug”), and inserting a marker into the broadcast to skip commercials, either automatically or based on a user input. Alternately, an audio-based approach may detect the onset of a commercial break by detecting an audio fade that typically separates a program from a commercial, or speech-to-text analysis may detect phrases like “we'll be back” or “welcome back.”
However, these techniques may not be available or appropriate for a provider of broadcasts of live events. A video feed received at the provider's central facility will typically maintain a view of the event space (e.g., for a sporting event, a wide view of the playing field), so no detection of black frames is possible; the feed received from a remote site at a central facility will not yet include a bug, so no detection of the absence of the bug is possible. While the manual insertion of such cues (e.g., the insertion of black frames by the remote site at an appropriate break) may be possible, it may also lead to the insertion of commercials at inappropriate times if the event video periodically includes black frames that may be mistaken for a cue to initiate a commercial break by detection logic. In addition to the possibility of inaccurate triggering of commercials, there may be operational or technical limitations on the provider that prevent insertion of such cues.